Matthews: Is Obama Too Cool For His 'Nasty, Heated' Enemies Like Limbaugh?

Chris Matthews seemed a tad bit concerned about his man Barack
Obama, on Thursday's Hardball, as the MSNBC host feared that the
President was "too cool for his nasty, heated" enemies like Rush Limbaugh. Matthews - who announced he is on Day 9 of his so far fruitless search for a Republican to appear on his show to slam the talk radio host - worried that Obama wasn't getting angry enough at his critics.

Matthews, who admitted he has a "heart for this guy" even went as far to ask his guest, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, "is it still possible that he could find greatness as president?" Alter tried to assuage Matthews' fears by assuring him that Obama can "absolutely" achieve that greatness and claimed he had "a reasonably good chance of getting into that first rank of American presidents."[audio available here]

The following is a full transcript of the interview segment as it was aired on the May 20 edition of Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS TEASING SEGMENT: Up next, the
right wing constantly goes to absurd extremes to demean President
Obama. I mean absurd. They'll call him anything. Nazi, Soviet. They
don't limit it. What do we make of it? Amid the madness the President just stays cool as a cucumber. Is he too cool for his nasty, heated enemy?

...

MATTHEWS:
Welcome back to Hardball. The right wing has made it their mission, it
seems, to undercut President Obama, to smear him at every chance. Rush
Limbaugh has been leading the charge. Here's some of Rush, just today.

(Begin clip)

RUSH
LIMBAUGH: The Democrat Party, the American left, the President of the
United States will destroy this party and destroy this country, in
order to maintain their power over it. This is the kind of stuff that
starts civil wars, folks. You want to know what happened to prosperity?
It's called liberalism. There's a giant disconnect - liberalism from
Americanism. What country does Barack Obama believe he is president of?

(End clip)

MATTHEWS: He's unbelievable.Remember
by the way, we have an open invitation to any Republican officeholder,
any respectable one to come on this show and say Rush is wrong. That
Rush is not the leader of the Republican Party. By the way you can pick
your target. Any nuance you disagree with him on. Any small point, any
peccadillo you find in this guy's argument. Just come on and tell us
you disagree with that. So far, nine days since we offered the
challenge, no takers.

Anyway despite the noise,
President Obama stays on an even keel. And it's his cool calm reality
that's become his trademark. But can he always be this cool?
Jonathan Alter has just written a big book. He examined President
Obama's first year in office with incredible, behind the scenes access.
His new book, what a great name, The Promise. Jonathan, my man who
studied with great effect Franklin Roosevelt, and the big guys.

Does he still...We
have a lot of very pro-Obama viewers that watch this program, and some
critics. And the question for the people with heart, and I'm one of
them, with heart for this guy, and I'm a critic sometimes. If you
have heart for Obama is it still possible that he could find greatness
as president? Do you see it?

JONATHAN ALTER, NEWSWEEK: Oh
absolutely! I mean look they, he won ugly on health care, Chris. But
this was the biggest domestic achievement in close to half a century.
And he is with only Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson now, in terms
of domestic achievement. It can all go wrong if unemployment doesn't
come down over four years. It can go wrong if it's disastrous in
Afghanistan. But has a reasonably good chance of getting into that first rank of American presidents.

MATTHEWS: Well let's talk about his temperament and the way he presents himself. During the campaign, we were all impressed, when I was going nuts, saying, "When's he gonna take on Senator Clinton? When's he gonna really challenge her?"

ALTER: Yeah!

MATTHEWS:
And all the time he was plotting with David Plouffe to get the
delegates he needed in those little states out west. So he had a plan
Does he have a plan now? All we see is the cool.

ALTER: Yeah.

MATTHEWS:
What's his plan to get the unemployment rate down to seven? What's his
plan to restore his connection with the blue collar worker out there
and the middle class worker who's either, out of work or worried about
being thrown out of work. How does he connect again?

ALTER: He
needs to, he needs to connect. That was the big failure of the first
year. He lost that connection to independents and a chunk of the middle
class. He's still pretty popular, his numbers are close to what he won
in the election. But, but something has atrophied there in his
connection with people and they're very conscious of it and they're
getting him out on the road more to deal with this. But he doesn't want
to throw a punch. And a lot of liberals want to see him deck somebody.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, yeah.

ALTER:
He's not into gestures, he's into winning and putting points on the
board, as they put it. But sometimes he can be a little too cool.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

ALTER:
And Paul Volcker told me, for instance said, he said, sometimes he
wants to just shake the President, say "God dammit get excited about
this!"

MATTHEWS: Okay I agree. By the way I've heard that from
people close to him. Here's a Boston Globe piece that gets to the heart
of this. This is about Martha Coakley who had a tin ear, I think. A
nice person, probably professionally great. But had a tin ear,
politically. Here's what the Globe said about her when she lost.
"Coakley bristles at the suggestion that with so little time left in an
election with such high stakes she is being too passive. 'As opposed to
standing outside Fenway Park, in the cold? shaking hands?' she fires
back." Well it's like Obama is like that. Here's Obama speaking at the
White House Correspondents Dinner the other night. And this didn't
bother me at the time, we were all laughing. But later I began to think
Obama is like that. This didn't bother me at the time, we're all
laughing and later I began to think, this is the wrong tone. Let's
listen.

(Begin clip)

BARACK OBAMA: Unfortunately, John
McCain couldn't make it. Recently, he claimed that he had never
identified himself as a maverick. And we all know what happens in
Arizona when you don't have ID. Adios amigos!

(End clip)

MATTHEWS:
Overwhelming the American people are completely frustrated by our
failure to protect American citizenship and residents at the border.
We're not doing it. And every other country does it, we don't do it.
He's joking about it. He's laughing at Arizona. Is that, is that
connection with the middle class and independent voter?

ALTER:
That, that probably was not very smart to joke about it, but it was
nothing compared to what Coakley did with, less than two weeks before
the election, to dis Fenway Park, which is, which is a shrine in Boston?

MATTHEWS: I know.

ALTER:
And so when Obama heard this, Axelrod told him this, when he wandered
into his office, and he grabbed Axelrod's shirt, and he said, "Tell me
she didn't say that, tell me that's not true." He knew immediately, not
only that Coakley was gonna lose but that health care was in, in deep
trouble.

MATTHEWS: Jon.

ALTER: So what I try to do in the book, Chris, is to take people behind those closed doors.

MATTHEWS:
Jon we're out of time. Jon please come back again. You'll come back and
talk about this, this book is gonna be a big one, The Promise by
Jonathan Alter.

-Geoffrey Dickens is the Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here

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